Music to Fight For

People who know me know that I love to listen to hiphop/rap music. I'm one of the rare people that know the history of the music and the underlying themes. I can hear the pulse of the beat and feel the words from the underground. My experience evolved from the days of after school specials...but on the radio. The DJ cutting and mixing the track for the people stuck in a traffic jam. I lived that and after two years of indulging myself in the "sins" of popular radio hits that demoralized women, glorified senseless violence, I found a new niche. They like to call it "conscious" hip hop. The picture to your right is one of the legendary Soulquarians, its members including Talib Kweli, Mos Def, ?uestlove of the Roots, and Common. The woman in the center with the hair decoration is Erykah Badu. She is Neo-soul. Afrocentric. Another fighter for love, peace, and unity. This is the kind of music I listen and read about on a consistent basis. One that highlights the black struggle in America and educates about the roots of Africa. Hip hop has wronged my culture many times. Notoriously, the west coast rappers that called out the Asian minority in California whose apparent success in the small business industry was enough to frustrate the struggling black community. They called for violence against the shopkeepers. All it took was some police brutality, and then when the Riots sparked, Asian Americans found themselves on the rooftops of their stores shooting at looters to protect the product of their hard work. But I feel for the black struggle as much as I feel for the struggle of my own background. Common's father once mentioned "the ingredients of acknowledgment, apology, amendment, and atonement" in a track off Common's "Finding Forever." At the very least America tries to accomplish these things for the people that they've wronged. Slavery, segregation are gone. Mr. Obama could be our next president. But where is the atonement for the Exclusion Acts, the brutality of building transportation we never got to use, and the internment camps bred by fear and ignorance? Where is our spokesperson? As these China-US tensions tighten, I can feel the strange sentiment in the air that inevitably will affect me only because I am misunderstood. Whenever someone does not recognize their identity as an Asian American, a Taiwanese American...whenever someone does not fight back with protest when others hurt their friends and family, I feel ashamed. Because that's the Perfect Immigrant. That's why I'm hoping for another form of the Soulquarians to arrive. Hope that they'll speak to me, educate me, recognize the struggle. Keep on. Justin is a firm believer in hip hop's ability to teach. He hopes that one day he'll see Taiwanese hip hoppers address the issues, and steer away from the money making schemes that have plagued the music.

Chopstick ingenuity

Ingenuity comes in all different forms. Current innovation has mostly been in information and computational technology in the last 30 years or so. We're starting to see the same in bioengineering, material engineering, and energy engineering. As an engineer, I'm pretty excited about the prospects of the future. But what we usually don't see are innovations in household items. That was done far back in the industrial revolution. It's hard to imagine that zippers, coat hangers, and washing machines as being innovations in the 21st century. In fact, when washing machines first came out, there were no wall sockets. People use to plug them into light bulb sockets. Even though things have improved since then, I'm still waiting for the washer/dryer combo in one, so I don't have to transfer clothes from one machine to another when I'm doing laundry. Even better if someone freakin' figured out how to automatically fold clothes. While we're at it, my clothes should be able to match clothes to create outfits for me so I don't have to think about that in the morning. So imagine my surprise when my parents went to Taiwan and came back with a gift from my cousin: retractable chopsticks. Innovation! But why would someone need something like this? Apparently, there's a trend (perhaps an old trend, I don't know) going on in Taiwan where the hygiene of disposable chopsticks were questionable. So people started bringing their own chopsticks to restaurants--just in case. Salmonella probably isn't on their list of "things to experience at least once in my life". But regardless of how true the fear of the disposable chopsticks are, it's socially acceptable for people to bring their own utensils. My parents suggested I take my new retractable chopsticks out for a spin. I imagined that it would be a good conversation piece, but on the downside, it would attract more attention than I'd like when I'm eating and I certainly can't eat pasta and steak with it. But I have used it at home. I find that it's generally functions as well as a normal pair of chopsticks, but you can't really split food with it. In addition, I had a nasty surprise when I ate a bowl of ramen with it. Hot metal chopsticks don't go well with unsuspecting lips. Well, if anything, since I can carry them anywhere now, I find that I can eat anywhere, like while watching TV. Especially Pringles. Innovation at its best. Wil Chung is a programmer working at a startup, 3cglabs. He fries turkeys for thanksgiving and is currently reading about pose estimation. When he's underwater, he can blow bubbles out of his left eye.

It's All Meat To Me

When I was in elementary school, I used to read those novels for young readers. In them, the main character would often be in third grade, not far from my own age at the time, and the plotline would follow his or her elementary school woes. He or she would usually face problems with baby teeth or bad math teachers or the awful things siblings did. These problems would often be exacerbated by the day’s dinner. The mother would uncover a casserole dish of meatloaf and the character would wrinkle his/her nose and respond with a hearty “yleck!” I had never eaten meatloaf. I assumed it was one of those gross things like Sloppy Joe's (one glance at one epitomizes elementary school cafeterias) and was nasty. My parents didn't make meatloaf. We had beef with noodles, pork with vegetables, chicken with soup – off the top of my head, nothing with vague names like “meatloaf.” This had roasted duck in it, this had ox tails. The word appeared in several stories, each time met with the same revulsion. Such repeated reactions gave me visions of lumps of something gray and suspicious looking. It even reached a point where I thought that meatloaf had nothing to do with meat and that the characters' disgust with the food was because it was called by a name it wasn’t. I had no idea what it really was. It turns out that meatloaf is just as it sounds: a loaf of meat. Thinking back, I don’t understand how these children I read about could have been disgusted by such a thing. It is delicious, savory protein with a succulent mix of seasonings just waiting to be digested. And sixteen years after my family moved to America, I finally know what meatloaf is. Jessica was properly introduced to the notorious meatloaf sometime in the past year or so. She enjoys meat and other protein-rich foods, such as peanut butter and tofu, but doesn’t like seeing whole roasted ducks hanging by their necks in shops.